page_title: Mari Lwyd
section_title: Etymology
hierarchical_section_title: Mari Lwyd / Early development / Etymology
caption_attribution_description: English: Mari Lwyd at Chepstow, January 2014 Русский: Обряд «Серая лошадь» в Чепстоу. Январь 2014
context_page_description: The Mari Lwyd is a wassailing folk custom found in South Wales. The tradition entails the use of an eponymous hobby horse which is made from a horse's skull mounted on a pole and carried by an individual hidden under a sackcloth. It represents a regional variation of a "hooded animal" tradition that appears throughout Great Britain.
  The custom was first recorded in 1800, with subsequent accounts of it being produced into the early twentieth century. According to these, the Mari Lwyd was a tradition performed at Christmas time by groups of men. They would form into teams to accompany the horse on its travels around the local area, and although the makeup of such groups varied, they typically included an individual to carry the horse, a leader, and individuals dressed as stock characters such as Punch and Judy. The team would carry the Mari Lwyd to local houses, where they would request entry through the medium of song. The householders would be expected to deny them entry, again through song, and the two sides would continue their responses to one another in this manner. If the householders eventually relented, then the team would be permitted entry and given food and drink.
context_section_description: Most recorded sources term this particular custom Mari Lwyd. Jones considered this to be a translation of "Blessed Mary", and thus a reference to Mary, mother of Jesus, a key religious figure in the Catholic Church. Although translating it slightly differently, as "Holy Mary", Peate endorsed this viewpoint. Although some of his acquaintances later suggested that the use of Mari for Mary was unknown in Wales prior to the Protestant Reformation, he countered these criticisms with the observation that the term Mari was being used in reference to the Virgin in the mid-14th century Black Book of Carmarthen, thus attesting to its early usage in Welsh. He nevertheless accepted that during the medieval period the term might have been restricted largely to poets, given that there is no evidence of its usage among the common dialect in this period.
  Given that llwyd is the usual word for "grey" in the Welsh language and that Welsh speakers would have been exposed to the English word "mare", an alternative suggestion considered by Peate was that the term Mari Lwyd had originally meant "Grey Mare". This etymological explanation would have parallels with the name of a similar hooded horse tradition found in Ireland and the Isle of Man, which is known in Irish as the Láir Bhán and in Manx as the Laare Vane, in both cases meaning "White Mare". Initially believing that "there is much to be said for this suggestion", Peate later embraced it fully. Cawte similarly believed that "Grey Mare" was the most likely original meaning of the term, noting that the Mari Lwyd appeared to represent a horse and that similar hobby horse customs in neighbouring England, such as the hoodening tradition of East Kent, also made reference to horses with their name. Peate suggested that even if the term Mari Lwyd had originally referred to a "Grey Mare", it could still have come to be associated with Mary in popular folk culture following the Reformation, thus explaining why Mary is referred to in the lyrics of some surviving Welsh wassailing songs.
  A further suggestion is that Mari Lwyd derives from the English term Merry Lude, referring to a merry game. Peate opposed this idea, arguing that if the latter was converted into Welsh then the result would be merri-liwt or merri-liwd. Peate also dismissed the idea that had been suggested to him that the term Mari in this context had derived from Morris, a reference to Morris dance. Another reason to doubt this idea is that there is no known historical link between the Mari Lwyd, which was found in South Wales, and the Morris dance, which was concentrated in the north of the country.
  In other recorded instances, the Mary Lwyd custom is given different names, with it being recorded as y Wasail "The Wassail" in parts of Carmarthenshire. In the first half of the 19th century it was recorded in Pembrokeshire under the name of y March "The Horse" and y Gynfas-farch "The Canvas Horse". One account from West Glamorgan has the head termed the aderyn bee [bi?] y llwyd, meaning the "Grey Magpie", although this may be due to an error on the part of the recorder, who could have confused the horse's head for the aderyn pica llwyd, an artificial bird in a tree that was carried by wassailers in the same area.
  Note that in modern Welsh, the Mari Lwyd is referred to with definite article y, which subsequently causes a soft mutation of m to f ([v]), rendering the form y Fari Lwyd.
caption: At the Chepstow Mari Lwyd, 2014
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